The Details

As frigid as last night was and as desolate as any Sunday night bar scene can be with only the prospect of Monday work week before it, I was out making my usual 2 a.m. coffee run and taking in the inevitable if sparse details. A city cop felt called upon and his blue and white shot out of the gate at Goodman and sped off up the Avenue. A young man with eye glasses commented in the crossing that, "He seems in a hurry!"

I noticed he wasn't hurried himself, despite the cold, and, some twenty minutes later, I caught him again. He was only a block further on then from where he had been and was standing by his lonesome the other side of the Avenue. He was mid-block in front of the Exxon and considering where there was to go.

On that walk for coffee, I thought the choice moment, though, was meeting with a posse of four or five that had just been let out of O'Cal's. They were all guy and, front and center, was their Alpha. It was like the others faded into the shadows of that nightly stretch of sidewalk and the one guy alone caught every bit of light there was. He had the wide stride and in the icy blue black air he was not only in shirt sleeves but his collar and cuffs were open; he had a cigarette pegged in the corner of a cocksure grin and seemed to be enjoying the afterglow of some smart remark or other.

But, if I was looking for something to write about, for inspiration - I found it later and not in something I saw on the Avenue but in something I heard when I was nearly home to 640. There was just enough and not too much of a breeze rippling the air and no traffic near or I might not have heard it at all. Approaching the corner of Wilmer St. and Lola's Bistro, the sound was like the mewing plaint of an aggrieved alley cat. I'd heard it before and knew there was no cat to look for slinking about or out on a fire escape. Sleepless, I'd been down on the block with a cigar enough times at four in the morning to know that the thick black sign that hangs straight out on an iron rod over Lola's corner doorway repeats and repeats that deceptively feline lament when there is any sort of a breeze.

In that sound it occurred to me that, if I aspire to anything in particular, it is to take in the details that make up these environs. To know this place and convey something of it in words, if anything, is what I have signed on here to do.

It is January 21, 2008.